Wednesday, 15 October 2008

"Woe Is Uh Me-Bop!" Lickin' Captain Beefheart's Decals Off, Baby.

I ripped mp3's from my vinyl of this way back, in the days when I had a functioning turntable, before I'd heard of blogs, or even knew what 'ripping' was, in cyber-techno-audio-speak! I did it via Logic and a Tascam two-track AD converter, i.e. my super-micro mini home studio set-up. The resulting files were 192 kbps MP3, and sound alright to me! Other bloggers will have posted this, but as it's my own rip, and as I love this album with an almost proprietary jealousy, I'm putting one of my ripped tracks up, via Soundcloud, anyway ... so there!

If you dig this, and you know you ought to, then you might also like this. It's some out-takes (band without vocals) from the sessions for the album. Also worth checking is the short promo film, allegedly produced to promote the album, but so off-kilter that it ended up being banned! And shown below is an image of a promo sticker that was included with some versions of the album. I bought mine second hand, in a record shop in Cambridge's Silver Street, long gone now (anyone remember the name of that shop?), and there was, alas, no sticker.

I love this album: it's more focused, precise and together than Trout Mask, and more intense and playful too. Gallons of ink have been spilt on describing it, so, if you need to know more check here & here, or better yet here (allmusic, wikipedia and amazon.co.uk respectively). All I want to say is that this is brilliant, original, and uncompromising music, played supremely well by excellent, sensitive players. Particularly noteworthy are John 'Drumbo' French's brilliant brittle drums, Art Tripp on marimba and traps - what a dude! - and those fabulous guitar instrumentals. Wow man, it's mind blower! In fact, as everybody in the band does such a sterling job, let's give them due props, and acknowledge who they are/were: